Nature Computational Science review maps four roles for LLMs as human proxies, each needing its own validity criteria
iyadrahwan · x · 2026-09-21
Karetnikov, Iyad Rahwan, and Davor Svetinovic published a review, "Large language models as human proxies," in Nature Computational Science, analyzing research across disciplines that explicitly or implicitly use LLMs to stand in for humans.
The paper organizes these uses into four roles:
- Believable agents
- Task agents
- Experimental subjects
- Silicon samples
Key conclusion: similarity to humans is not a single feature—each role supports a different scientific claim and requires its own validity criteria, providing a taxonomy for the growing practice of computationally approximating human behavior with LLMs.
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